Welcome to Whitken & Co.! We are a design studio and lifestyle blog based in Anderson, SC. Our goal is to help you create a beautiful functional, and healing home for you and your family to live, work, play in, and share with others.

Beauty and character, although they may seem effortless, seldom rarely are. Behind the scenes is often a lot of demolition and deconstruction. Tearing out of the old and ugly in order to create, build, and reveal something special and wonderful. Sometimes all it requires is a little tap of the hammer or gentle pry of the crow bar to knock something loose, sometimes it involves whaling back with all of your might and strength to loosen things up and pry them out, and sometimes you have to pull on your gloves and rip them out with your hands and sheer force of will. Sometimes you are the one doing the demolition and sometimes outside forces do it for you.

At the end, when all has been stripped away, you’re left standing in the mess, matted hair, sweat trickling down your face and back, bloody knuckles, filthy clothes that you hardly recognize anymore. You’re surrounded by debris and left staring at the gaping holes you didn’t even know were there. But as the dust settles and you begin to clear out the refuse, you start to see the rugged beauty that was hidden unknown beneath the surface. Imagining all of the possibilities, you start to get a vision for what it (or you) can become.

In life and art, in creating and renovating and restoring, things must often get worse before they get better. Chaos must ensue before order, confusion before clarity. But when we push through the pain, when we allow the demolition and the deconstruction, when we work through the confusion and the chaos, that’s when the magic starts to happen. Not the kind of magic where the magician flicks a handkerchief and a bouquet appears. But more like the magic of a sculptor slowly chipping away at a block of marble to reveal what only he can see, or the magic of a potter shaping mud with her hands.

It’s scary, the ripping out and demolition part, whether it’s your house or your heart. But it’s also exciting. True, ugly things will surface, some major, requiring a total gut job, and some minor, allowing for a quick patch and fix. But the beauty and the possibilities that are also hiding and waiting to be brought forth are worth the pain and worth the work.